Despite drier than normal conditions experienced by landowners in 2018, the value of rural land has increased significantly across the central west, central tablelands and north west when compared to the previous year, a new report has found.
The Valuer General’s report on NSW land values at July, 1, 2018, found rural land values increased across NSW over the 12 months to 1 July 2018.
Acting Valuer General Michael Parker said in general terms, increases in farm values are a sign of confidence in the rural sector.
The rural sector takes a longer term view and buyers are aware that seasonal conditions change.” Of the 19,022 rural properties in the Central Tablelands the total land value at July 1, 2018 was $8,336,786,341, an increase of 15.9 per cent from the previous year.
The report found that despite the dry conditions seen in 2018 strong stock and commodity prices and limited rural properties being offered to market increased demand for rural properties in the Central Tablelands, with land values increasing strongly by 15.9 per cent.
Strong demand for broad acre rural properties, increased investor demand and limited supply helped rural land values in the Central West region surge 24.1 per cent.
The total 20,649 rural properties in the Central West zone were valued at $13,962,861,853 at July, 1 2018.
The increases varied across the region from 10.1 per cent in the Weddin LGA to 66.8 per cent in Parkes LGA.
There was an 11.2 per cent increase of rural land value in North West, NSW.
Mr Parker said the land values determined by the Valuer General are specifically made to use in the collection of rates and land tax.

On the ground: Premier Steven Marshall meets Tanja Morgan and David Evans at Karoonda on Wednesday.
Photo: Peri Strathearn.
Drought is an urgent issue in the Mallee, but it was not the only one on the minds of the farmers who met Premier Steven Marshall at Karoonda this morning.
Fifty or more attended a meeting at the Magpies’ football clubrooms, part of a regional tour of drought-affected districts by the Premier and MPs Tim Whetstone and Adrian Pederick.
One livestock producer said he had had less than four inches of rainfall in 12 months, and had not reaped a single bale of hay in two years.
"I call myself a producer but I’m more of an undertaker," he said.
"I’ve found three (sheep) yesterday and one already today."
He proposed an emergency supply of feed pellets, produced from vine prunings, substandard fruit or downgraded grain, which could be kept in storage and deployed whenever drought struck somewhere around Australia.
Mr Whetstone advised that help was already available from the likes of Buy a Bale, Rural Aid, Family and Business Support and Rural Business Support.
Mr Marshall predicted water prices would fall by 2020 under SA Water’s new board, and following an inquiry into the previous government’s over-valuation of the utility.

PHOENIX — House Speaker Rusty Bowers warned Tuesday he won’t be pressured by Gov.
Doug Ducey into approving a drought contingency plan, which lawmakers have yet to see, by a Jan. 31 deadline.
Bowers told Capitol Media Services that the governor made a big show of announcing on Monday and again Tuesday the number of days that remain ahead of the deadline set by Brenda Burman, Reclamation Bureau commissioner, for Arizona to adopt its plan for dealing with the shortage of Lake Mead water.
Bottom line, Bowers said, is if he does not get actual language of the agreement by Wednesday, “I’m adding a day.” And if there’s no language on Thursday, add another day to that.
“I have an obligation, as the speaker of the House, to my membership and to our constituents,” the Mesa Republican said.
“We are not going to act without knowing what we do.” It’s not just Bowers who is balking.
Senate Minority Leader David Bradley, a Tucson Democrat, made it clear lawmakers won’t be stampeded into adopting something just to meet the Jan. 31 deadline.
“The Jan. 31st deadline is crystal clear,” he said.
Rep. David Cook, R-Globe, said the Pinal County farmers he represents have no problem with reaching a deal, even with a sharp cut in Colorado River water deliveries and being forced to let 30 percent to 40 percent of their land go fallow.
“We need the assurances of the agricultural community that we’re just not entering into an agreement that can be changed or altered later on and the water not delivered,” he said Tuesday.

A Jan. 31 deadline is approaching for the Drought Contingency Plans, a set of agreements between seven states about how to manage dwindling water supplies, including here in the Mountain West.
The region has been in a drought for 19 years now, and water levels continue to retreat in major reservoirs.
Bart Miller with the regional conservation group Western Resource Advocates says the river serves about 40 million people.
“There’s a lot at stake,” says Miller, who directs the group’s Healthy Rivers program.
“The Drought Contingency Plan is an effort to start taking some proactive actions now that avoid the worst impacts of shortage.” Miller says the drought planning is short on details, but it’s a way for states including Colorado, Utah and Wyoming to strategize about how to better store water and incentivize people to use less of it.
Without a plan, he says, the states could face involuntary, uncompensated water restrictions in the future.
So far, all states except Arizona — and a few California water agencies — have agreed to sign off on the plan.
They have until the end of the month.
At that point, as Bureau of Reclamation commissioner Brenda Burman has said, her federal agency will step in.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, Yellowstone Public Radio in Montana, KUER in Salt Lake City and KRCC and KUNC in Colorado.

The four-week dry spell has caused some farmers to delay planting summer crops, which include the country’s staple corn, while those that sowed earlier have seen plants withering in the absence of rain.
However, the science is disputed by some meteorologists.
While it’s too early to estimate the effects on harvests, the government should start cloud seeding to “save the situation”, he said.
Zimbabwe has endured intermittent food shortages since the government began an often-violent programme that seized most white-owned, large-scale farms from 2000.
The situation has been exacerbated by periodic droughts.
Today, the country is a net importer of crops such as soy, used as animal feed, and, often, corn.
Traditionally, rain falls between late November and early April.
While parts of the country could expect heavy rain in January, it is mostly moving in from from the south, the department said.
Zimbabwe relies mainly on the inter-tropical convergence zone weather phenomenon, which brings rain down from the equator.
“But planting in January?

Likewise, about 15 percent of the state is in a “severe drought;”; last year at this time, that number was zero.
David Miskus, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who authored the report, tells Salon that California is having what he calls a “subnormal winter season,” adding that the upcoming part of the winter season still has an opportunity to provide the region with rain.
Faith Kearns, a researcher with the California Institute for Water Resources, agreed there is still time to decide whether this winter is a dry one or not.
Additionally, the winter of 2017, which brought some of the most intense storms in years to state, had an impact that trickled into the winter of 2018 — hence, the smaller percentage of drought conditions across the state in 2017 and early 2018.
Unless California sees more rain in the winter of 2018/2019, the state may see a bad fire season — again.
Indeed, California had its deadliest wildfire season ever in 2018.
Dr. Samuel Sandoval Solis, an Associate Professor in the department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California, Davis, tells Salon that droughts in California have a variety of short-term effects in regard to how they affect the next fire season.
First, he said, droughts kill trees, and dead trees give wildfires the fuel they need to spread.
“I hope that doesn’t happen this year, but it is likely because when you have late rains — and for us late rain should be March and April — but basically you have understory, and when you have that underneath the trees, the grass will grow taller in late rain,” he explained.
As Miskus explained, “all signals are pointing to El Niño” weather patterns this winter, which typically means a wetter winter.

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Most of South Florida is in a moderate drought, and Lake Okeechobee is sitting at about 12.6 feet above sea level.
“We are a tourist area and people come here to fish the lake, and when the water gets too low they can’t launch their boats,” said Commissioner Bryant Culpepper, Okeechobee County.
Lake Okeechobee’s level is still in the comfort zone to avoid a water shortage, but officials say warnings could be coming.
Lake O serves as a backup water supply for West Palm Beach, and the South Florida Water Management District says water restrictions are not in place because we’re not there yet.
“It causes a lot of external problems when you get a large deviation in the water,” Culpepper said.
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News The city of Cape Coral is working on yet another project to fend off any future droughts.
The city of Cape Coral is working on yet another project to fend off any future droughts.
The city wants to put a weir at the mouth of the Midsummer Canal on NE 24th Avenue.
The dam would hold back 3,000 acre-feet of water in the Cape’s canal system, instead of letting it flow into the Yellow Fever Creek and out to the Caloosahatchee.
This would leave the Cape with 3,000 million gallons of water a day to pull from during the dry season.
"The key to reliability in our irrigation system is storage," utilities director Jeff Pearson said.
"Being able to store more water in those canals is a great bang for our buck project."
This weir joins the reservoir at the southwest aggregate mine in Punta Gorda, the FGUA pipeline, and the reclaimed water agreement with Fort Myers, as ways the Cape is working to keep water in its canals.
The weir is the Cape’s part of an inter-local agreement with Lee County.
The county will be building a retention pond and pump station in the Yellow Fever Creek Preserve, to help with water retention and cleanup.

The State government on Thursday declared 931 more villages as drought hit.
Two days after announcing drought in 151 tehsils, the State had added 250 more revenue circles to the list, which constitutes around 7,500 villages.
Maharashtra has already sought ₹7,962 crore from the centre for drought assistance.
A team of central officers visited the State last month to take stock of the situation.
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TUCSON – Tree rings going back 800 years are giving researchers at the University of Arizona a window into how climate change could expand the planet’s most extreme deserts, including the Sonoran, which extends from the Baja Peninsula into Southern California and much of southern Arizona.
“We see a trend, atmospherically speaking, that the tropical region is moving further north in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Valerie Trouet, a dendrochronologist and associate professor at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona.
“We can determine how the edge of the tropics has moved over the last 800 years,” Trouet said.
Trouet, who co-authored a study published in October in the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the expansion of the tropics northward from 1568 to 1634 coincided with severe droughts, the collapse of Turkey’s Ottoman empire and the end of China’s Ming Dynasty.
“Our results suggest that climate change was one of the contributing factors to those societal disruptions,” said Trouet in a recent UA News article about the study.
The team’s findings are important because they could help explain how ongoing droughts could change some of the planet’s desert regions, including the Sonoran.
The Sonoran Desert lies on the edge of the tropics, where air-driven atmospheric circulation sinks.
These huge atmospheric circulations are known as Hadley cells and they are the primary driver of the tropics.
The National Weather Service describes Hadley cells as warm air rising at the equator, and sinking around 30 degrees latitude north and south.
UA researchers combined tree-ring data from five mid-latitude regions in the Northern Hemisphere.